Bloomberg: Shell Receives Permits to Start $600 Mln Gas Plant in Mexico (ShellNews.net)

Posted 30 Sept 04

Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Sempra Energy received permits from Mexico for construction of a $600 million liquefied-natural gas terminal to process gas from Russia for sale locally and in California.

``I understand all the permits are in order,'' Peter Kidd, president of Shell's Mexican unit, said in an interview in Mexico City. The company will decide when to start construction ``in a relatively near future,'' Kidd said.

Mexico's energy regulator granted the Shell-led group a permit to stock natural gas in Baja California, according to the website of the Regulatory Energy Commission. Permits are also required from agencies such as the Environment Protection ministry, said Martin Mora, the spokesman of the Energy Ministry.

The group led by Shell plans to build a re-gasification plant in Baja California on the Mexican Pacific Coast to treat natural gas brought in liquid tanks from the Shell-led Sakhalin project in Russia. The plant, scheduled for completion in 2007, would process about 1 billion cubic feet of gas a day.

More than half of the terminal's output will be used in Mexico, while the rest will be shipped to California, said Ann Pickard, Shell's director of Global LNG and Power in an interview in June.

Royal Dutch/Shell is owned by companies based in the U.K. and the Netherlands. Royal Dutch Petroleum, based in The Hague, owns 60 percent, and London-based Shell Transport & Trading owns the rest. San Diego-based Sempra is the biggest gas distributor in the U.S.

To contact the reporter on this story:

Inti Landauro in Mexico City at  ilandauro@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Laura Zelenko in New York at  lzelenko@bloomberg.net

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